Blog Archive

Emily's New Video Series: Snapshots From Space

Posted by Mat Kaplan on 2012/02/20 04:29 CST

This is the first episode of editor Emily Lakdawalla's new video series exploring the solar system.

Astrophotography - Jupiter by Jason Davis

Adventures in urban astrophotography

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/20 01:55 CST

Just because you live in an urban area with skyglow doesn't mean you can't have fun with astrophotography. How to capture the planets, constellations and the ISS.

More Dawn Vesta approach images: first color views

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/17 11:37 CST

�On June 30, Dawn stopped thrusting for a full Vestian day -- five hours and 20 minutes -- and just watched the asteroid rotate. But unlike the previous observations, they used all of Dawn's�color filters�to acquire the best-ever color photos of the lumpy world.

Discouraging the search for Mars Polar Lander

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/17 02:26 CST

I'm not encouraging people to search individual images for the Mars Polar Lander anymore, for three reasons.�

The Scale of the Universe, by Cary and Michael Huang

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/16 10:14 CST

Cary and Michael Huang present a basic "powers of ten" visualization starting at human scale from which you can scrub downward smaller than quarks or upward to the scale of the entire universe.

Where are the big Kuiper belt objects?

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/02/16 05:35 CST | 6 comments

Earlier today I wrote a post about how to calculate the position of a body in space from its orbital elements. I'm trying to get a big-picture view of what's going on in trans-Neptunian space.